rFpro has been announced as a consortium partner in two government-funded projects aimed at strengthening the UK’s connected and automated mobility supply chain.
The UK's Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) is funding 13 projects involving 43 British companies developing self-driving technologies, products and services ready for the connected and automated mobility (CAM) market.
CCAV has awarded a £2 million grant to the Sim4CAMSens project. The consortium consists of rFpro, Claytex, Syselek, Oxford RF, WMG, National Physical Laboratory, Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, and AESIN.
The project aims to enable accurate representation of Automated Driving System (ADS) sensors in simulation. It will develop a sensor evaluation framework that spans modelling, simulation and physical testing. The project will involve the creation of new sensor models, improved noise models, new material models and new test methods to allow ADS and sensor developers to accelerate their development.
A further £2m has been awarded to a second project, DeepSafe. The DeepSafe consortium including rFpro, DG Cities, Imperial College London and Claytex and will unlock a barrier to the commercialisation and deployment of self-driving vehicles. Together, the partners will develop the simulation-based training needed to train autonomous vehicles (AVs) to handle ‘edge cases’, the rare, unexpected driving scenarios that AVs must be prepared to encounter on the road.
DeepSafe will commercialise ‘sensor real’ edge case data – a simulation of what an actual sensor would detect – together with AV training tools, for release in the UK and internationally after the project.
As well as advancing self-driving systems, the grants aim to support innovation in industry, job creation and investment, building the capacity to develop AV technology in the UK and export it to the rest of the world.